Multilingual App Toolkit for Visual Studio 2012 - Windows 8

December 13, 2012

Visual Studio is one of the most popular tools throughout
the world for developing Enterprise applications across all
Microsoft platforms, including Windows. With the recent
introduction of Windows 8, creating multilingual applications
becomes much easier with 109 languages supported right out of the
box.

Using Visual Studio 2012 for Window 8 along with Microsoft's
newly introduced tool "Multilingual
App Toolkit", which is a free extension, you can easily
add multilingual support for your international applications. This
toolkit makes it possible to localize your application into
different languages in just a few simple steps.

Localization process using Multilingual App Toolkit (MAT)

After installing the toolkit and enabling it in Visual Studio
2012, you can simply add a new translation language for your
current ready-to-localize project. Next you can also generate
a pseudo-translation for testing the internationalization aspects
of the project before proceeding to the final translation.

Add New Language

Generate Pseudo Language

Generating XLIFF format

Furthermore, a great feature was also introduced that fully
supports the international standard for localization (xliff) format
for project localization resources. This process ensures that
localization resource files are available for translators without
the need for conversion during the exporting and importing process.
After building the application, the target languages will be
created in xliff format with the English content populated and
ready for translation.

Once this step is completed, use Visual Studio to generate xliff
files. Since most translation service providers can easily work
with xliff files, you can simply export and import content in this
format from Visual Studio IDE. Here's how it
works: Simply right click the XLF file and select
Send for Translation and adjust settings such as
send by email, email recipients or export the xliff file(s) to a
local folder. Once the translation process is complete, you can
simply right click the XLF file, select Import
/translation and choose the file to import.

Sending Translation

Importing Translation

Other localization features built-in Visual Studio

In addition to the aforementioned Multilingual App Toolkit
designed for Windows 8 Applications, Visual Studio also has other
features for localization such as Generate Local Resource
designed to extract all the UI strings into a resource file and
replace the strings with meta:resourcekey="KeyName"

Generate Local Resource

Resource file

Also, to extract strings from HTML controls we can use the
component "Localize" to handle these types of non-server controls.
For non-page related strings (common strings used across the
application) Global Resource files can be used to store these texts
and to be retrieved based on the current culture used.

Localize component

Usage in code

Global Resource

Visual Studio third-party extensions for localization

Beyond built-in features, there are many third-party extensions
that can be integrated and used to accelerate the localization and
internationalization processes. For example, some of these tools
can used to perform a complete search in all the application
sections and filter all the strings that need to be localized or
compare items between resource files (Source / target languages)
and many other features:

Search for embedded strings to externalize

Display all strings that could need
extraction

GPI Localization tool (G11TOOL)

Among these localization tools, the GPI engineering team
developed a robust and easy-to-use localization application
"G11Tool" that in addition to handling the localization process for
Microsoft platform can also handle other formats such as PHP, JAVA,
SQL, plain text, xml, JavaScript. Better yet, it hasthe ability to
adapt any other format provided for localization.

GPI G11Tool Project settings

Scan Files for embedded strings and export files in
ready to translate formats

GPI
G11Tool was developed using Microsoft Technology and is used as
a standalone application in order to be able to handle almost all
types of files format without restrictions.

Further Web Localization and Globalization Resources

GPI, a premiere translation
company has created a more extensive overview of website
globalization for several global markets in a series of
Website Globalization and E-Business Series white papers, which
you may download for free. You may also benefit by reviewing the
following resources on different aspects of website translation and
website localization:

Globalization Partners International helps customers enter new
markets by providing comprehensive website translation services
into a variety of languages. Free translation quotes can also be
obtained from GPI by submitting source files through our Request
a Translation Quote.

You may contact GPI at info@globalizationpartners.com
or at 866-272-5874 with your specific questions about your target
global markets and your project goals.

Comments

Ayman El Badawy - Manager, Technical Delivery - Global Software PracticeAyman is a native Arabic speaker with extensive expertise in
Arabic software and website localization. He is a Microsoft Certified professional (MCP) since 2001 and earned several certificates including MCSD, MCAD, MCTS and MCPD. He has over 12 years’ experience in software / websites engineering using Microsoft Programming tools including C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server, Visual Studio and other tools such as HTML, JavaScript, XML, Ajax and others.